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Thursday, April 18, 2013

The 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners for Photography

This week, the 2013 Pulitzer Prize Winners were announced which included awardees in the Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography categories of photojournalism. Since its inception, the Pulitzer Prizes have helped recognize excellence in many fields, most notably in journalism. The tradition continues this year, with five winners sharing one prize, and both categories sharing a distressing theme.

The Pulitzer Prizes were established in 1917 as set out in the will of pioneering journalist Joseph Pulitzer. The earliest prizes were given in order to encourage excellence in the fields of journalism, letters, drama, education and traveling scholarships. Today, there are 21 categories for the Pulitzer Prizes, with the aim still to recognize excellence in journalism as well as literary and musical composition.

As in the past, this year's awards were given in several categories of journalism, as well as special awards in arts and music. In the field of photojournalism, there are two categories, namely Breaking News Photography and Feature Photography. This year's recognized Feature Photography prize went to Javier Manzano, with the Breaking News Photography prize being shared by five winners, namely Rodrigo Abd, Manu Brabo, Narciso Contreras, Khalil Hamra and Muhammed Muheisen.

While a prize being split among five photographers is in itself a bit unusual, the more important detail for this year's Pulitzer prize-winning photographs is that they are all about the ongoing Syrian civil war. Manzon's image (the cover image above) of Syrian rebels hiding in a storage room covered by a bullet-ridden metal sheet may have won the feature photography category, but the other images are just as telling of the Syrian conflict.

While this week's news is depressing, they offer a stark reminder that violence can be found in any part of the world, and photojournalism's role is to capture these moments not for their entertainment value, but to offer a lesson to future generations in the hopes that these mistakes won't happen again.